deepanddark20 said:
I suppose while I'm on this thread I'll mention one more little personal issue I have, but this next thing I'm about to mention is not specifically an issue with your despecialized edition but with a general trend I've noticed in fan preservations. It's the lack of "Episode IV A New Hope" in the opening title crawl.
I know, I know, the original theatrical presentation in 1977 didn't have those words. But surely almost everybody grew up watching copies that did, right? Those words were not a "Special Edition" alteration, so if your goal is to remove "Special Edition" changes, you don't have to remove those words.
FWIW, I also saw it more times on video than in the theatre, but every single time I saw it on video, the crawl seemed particularly wrong (not only is the name of the movie wrong, but the entire planet of Tatooine misses its musical cue). So sheer volume of viewings isn't a good metric, many of us suffered through what we felt was the wrong crawl for decades. The reason it's such a "trend" these days is because so many of us prefer the theatrical version.
As others have said, this is a theatrical preservation. Not only is the crawl different than your home video experience, but the colors/brightness are different than VHS (as you have noticed), the default soundtrack is different, and you can actually see most of the stars in the space scenes. It doesn't mean the Despecialized Editions are "wrong", they just have a different goal than you'd like them to have. Given their goal or preserving the theatrical experience, however, they are extremely successful.
But for what it's worth, not all preservations are trying to preserve the theatrical look & feel. There are different projects here that attempt to re-create the 1980's home video experience, such as here: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/GOUT-Extremely-Cruddy-Edition/topic/15871/
Take a look around. Just because this project doesn't share your priorities doesn't mean there aren't others that do, or that you can't VHS-ify the Despecialized Edition yourself.